In Animate Literacies Nathan Snaza proposes a new theory of literature and literacy in which he outlines how literacy is both constitutive of the social and used as a means to define the human. Weaving new materialism with feminist, queer, and decolonial thought, Snaza theorizes literacy as a contact zone in which humans, nonhuman animals, and nonvital objects such as chairs and paper all become active participants. In readings of classic literature by Kate Chopin, Frederick Douglass, James Joyce, Toni Morrison, Mary Shelley, and others, Snaza emphasizes the key roles that affect and sensory experiences play in literacy. Snaza upends common conceptions of literacy and its relation to print media, showing instead how such understandings reinforce dehumanizations linked to dominant imperialist, heterosexist, and capitalist definitions of the human. The path toward disrupting such exclusionary, humanist frameworks, Snaza contends, lies in formulating alternative practices of literacy and literary study that escape disciplined knowledge production.

Nathan Snaza teaches English literature, gender studies, and educational foundations at the University of Richmond.

Acknowledgments  vii
1. The Human(ities) In Crisis  1
2. Beloved's Dispersed Pedagogy  11
3. Haunting, Love, and Attention  19
4. Humanizing Assemblages I: What Is Man?  28
5. Slavery, the Human, and Dehumanization  38
6. Literacy, Slavery, and the Education of Desire  48
7. What Is Literacy?  55
8. Humanizing Assemblages II: Discipline and Control  66
9. Bewilderment  77
10. Toward a Literary Ethology  86
11. What Happens When I Read?  99
12. The Smell of Literature  115
13. Pleasures of the Text  124
14. Those Changeful Sites  134
15. Literacies against the State  145
16. Futures of Anima-Literature  153
Notes  165
References  193
Index  209